How To Get A Great Looking Ecommerce Website Without Hiring A Designer

Welcome to part 3 of a 3 part video series on how to create an online store and own your own website without any technical experience required.

Today, I’m going to teach you how to get a great looking website without having to hire a designer and without having to spend a lot of money. In an informal survey that I conducted among my readers a while back, the second biggest mental hurdle to starting an ecommerce website is the design aspect of the store.

Photo By Auswandem Malaysia

Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t web designers. Most of us aren’t very artistic and most of us are not well versed in the art of writing html or php.

The good news is that you don’t really have to be an expert in any of those things in order to put up a good looking online store.

The Beauty Of Open Source

One of the best aspects of using an open source shopping cart such as Open Cart is that it is a standard platform. As a result, many 3rd party developers actively create themes, templates and plugins for Open Cart and many of them are free or can be purchased at a very low cost.

For example, many of the templates for Open Cart are free or can be had for as little as $25. A template is a theme for your shopping cart that completely transforms the look and feel of your online store. While your products and your database remain the same, the aesthetics for your shop can be instantly changed to suit your tastes.

In addition, you can purchase a wide variety of 3rd party plugins that add additional functionality to your online store at little or no cost as well.

Installing A Shopping Cart Template

Today’s video will give you a brief overview about shopping cart templates and themes and provide you with a complete walkthrough on how to install your theme once you make a purchase.

Once again, there is no technical experience required to follow along. Enjoy the video!

I currently use Homestead to host my website and am using one of their free templates. Do you know if it’s possible to purchase an inexpensive template that will work on Homestead instead of Open Cart? I am wondering if there’s a way to load the zip files onto my Homestead site. This seems like a much more viable option that buying one of their “premium” designs for hundreds of dollars.

I’m not currently looking at ecommerce at the moment but I’ve made a note of this for when I do. Even as someone with a reasonable amount of experience designing and creating websites ecommerce still strikes that fear into my heart to a certain extent so I’ll definitely check this out if/when I need one!

I have been trying to install a purchased theme and having troubles, can you go over step by step and slower.. your sites video is blurry and hard to see.
i have a zipfile on my computer and have tried to upload to open cart but nothing works

i am really happy to watch your videos, at least some body is there who can help me out.
Actually i take the above domain and i want to start my online shop.
please answer my two questions, i.e how would i get the drop shippers and there product product pic( i am leaving in India) and my second question is that how would i get my manufacturer from Bangladesh for producing my own brand at startup label.
Please describe in detail especially my first question and also provide me some links and methods. Actually i am fed up from my job. I have no other way.

Hi Steve,
We’ve used Open Cart for years. I still think OC is 1 one of the best free shoeing carts. However, I’ve found that OC’s not the best decision when you sell different vintage collectibles because you should delete sold items and their links. It’s not good for SEO. On the other hand, many customers aren’t happy spending their time listing sold items too. I wanted to say that OC isn’t a good idea if you sell collectibles. Well, what I’ve done; I created a WP blog and added it to the store and it helps to have the more constant back links.